God Is Red

July 11, 2011
Liao (The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories) is a Chinese dissident and journalist whose essays and interviews (presented as dialogues) examine pockets of Christianity within 20th-century China and how they have grown. The spread of missionaries gave the church an effective voice across the land until the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong. Mostly anecdotal tales provide glimpses of worship in settings from the smallest villages to the house churches of modern Beijing. Most interesting is the growth of the state-sanctioned Three Self Patriot Churches (self-governance, self propagation and self-support). The author profiles a diverse group, from a parish priest and a doctor to several lay evangelists. In a land as vast as China, with its multitude of languages and ethnic minorities, the Communists were able to dominate a well-established Christian church during the Cultural Revolution. Once Mao died, the church started to slowly regain momentum. This book will appeal to those interested in the Chinese church since 1900.

September 1, 2011
Running from government security agents in 2004, writer and musician Liao fled to Dali, in China's southwesternmost province, Yunnan, which has a long history of Christianity among its minority peoples. There he met a physician who, rather than renounce Christianity, threw over his official career to exercise his ER surgeon's skills gratis among Yunnan's poor. His story is one of 15 that Liao presents as transcribed conversations, each introduced by a page or so of context setting. Other interviewees include a nearly centenarian nun, a man unable to afford treatment for cancer, a minister in the underground church in Beijing, a former avant-garde poet (a personal friend of Liao), and even a young convert to the state-sanctioned church, which Liao's other subjects distrust. The older folk all tell of dispossession, torture, imprisonment, and the deaths of loved ones at the hands of the Communists, and like their interviewer, they know they could be arrested again tomorrow, which would make this moving book's title seem bitterly ironic were it not for Christian forgiveness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2011

A fascinating collection of interviews exploring the resurgence of Christianity in China.

No stranger to censorship, award-winning Chinese author, journalist and poet Liao (The Corpse Walker, 2008) has spent time in prison for writing critically of China's Communist regime. Here the author examines Christianity, which survived under China's Cultural Revolution despite attempts to eradicate it as a "lackey of the imperialists." While atheism remains the cultural norm in China today, estimates report that Christianity now stands as China's largest formal religion, surpassing both Buddhism and Taoism in numbers. In an attempt to understand why a foreign religion gained such popularity, Liao interviews a wide range of Chinese Christians, from an elderly nun who witnessed both the closing and eventual reopening of her church by the Communist regime, to a missionary doctor treating impoverished villagers in lieu of working in a government-run hospital, to a dying tailor who finds meaning in his recent conversion to the faith. Many of the interviewees recall hardships such as being socially ostracized, beaten, paraded in dunce caps or even arrested and tortured--and this in addition to suffering from the mass famine that claimed millions of lives between 1959 and 1962. A non-Christian himself, Liao transcribes his interviews with little additional commentary, allowing the heartbreaking tales of persecution and spiritual fervor to speak for themselves.

Will appeal to both Christian and secular readers interested in the cultural realities of China's Great Leap Forward.

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